The invention relates to an automatic monitoring system of a direct current source by storage batteries housed in battery rooms located at a certain distance from a centralized processing unit associated with a display screen to indicate the charge and capacity available per battery and to converse with the operator, the system comprising monitoring means of certain physical parameters representative of the operating state of all the battery cells or of certain pilot cells in each battery, notably the density, temperature, and electrolyte level contained in said pilot cell, and the voltage of this cell.
In submarines with conventional or nuclear propulsion, one or two batteries provide the propulsion and the electrical power supply of the immersed submarine (conventional propulsion) or in back-up mode (nuclear propulsion).
A submarine battery is made up of a plurality of cells, electrically connected in series.
The batteries are arranged in several rows in one or two battery rooms in the forward and aft parts of the submarine.
Each battery room is in the form of a leaktight room, in depression, and ventilated to eliminate the hydrogen given off by the batteries during the charging and discharging cycles. The battery room constitutes an explosible environment, which can become explosive, under abnormal operating conditions (ventilation stopped . . . ).
The submarine commander must be able on the one hand to regularly estimate the remaining capacity of its battery, so as to use it as best as possible according to the circumstances, and on the other hand to monitor the state of the battery to detect faulty cells.
These two functions, charge estimation and battery monitoring, require frequent checking of different parameters representative of the state of the battery, notably:
the electrolyte density of certain pilot cells
the electrolyte temperature of these cells
the electrolyte level of these cells
the voltage of these cells.
At present, a sailor goes down into battery room several times a day; dressed in overalls, gloves and glasses to protect him against acid projections, he crawls across the battery covers to weigh the acid, measure the temperature and the level of certain pilot cells.
It is state-of-the-art to replace this human checking by intermittent local rounds by an automatic monitoring system of the battery parameters (see U.S. Pat. No. 4,280,097). A device of this kind requires connecting cables between the batteries and the data concentrators, which complicates maintenance in the battery room and does not lend itself to modularity of the architecture.